This guide offers an overview of Ericksonian Hypnosis and recommends important publications that often appear on eBay. Milton H Erickson practiced and taught from the 1920's to his death in 1980 and his outstanding contribution to the field of indirect hypnosis and strategic therapy has made him one of the most important influences in contemporary psychotherpy. He was a practicing psychologist and psychiatrist, professor and lecturer, founding president of the Ameriacn Society of Clinical Hypnosis and Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was author of over one hundred books, articles and papers. These papers have been published in a four volume set as the "The Collected Papers of Milton H Erickson" and are essential reading for anyone interested in Hypnosis. There are many other books available by or about Erickson. The books co-authored with Ernest Rossi represent the most important of Erickson's other books, especially those that focus on the application of indirect suggestion such as "Hypnotic Realities"

The history of Indirect Suggestion goes back to the late1800's when they were called mediate suggestions. Bernheim later coined the phrase ideo-dynamic components of suggestion, meaning the parts of a suggestion that appeal to the unconscious mind rather than to the conscious. In this respect, Bernheim was perhaps the grandfather of current Ericksonian Hypnosis.

In the 1920's when early researchers such as Hill and Hilgard tried to standardise hypnotic inductions by using direct and authoritarian forms of suggestion to measure hypnotic suggestability, the indirect forms were forgotten about.

The uniqueness of indirect suggestion lies in it's application to the needs of the individual patient. It consists of a series of flexible linguistic skills that can be adapted to meet the goals of different therapies. They can be applied in alternative therapies, general practice, social work, dentistry and many other fields not normally associated with hypnosis. As these forms of suggestions are so indirect they can be inserted into everyday conversation and therefore offer practitioners valuable additional skills for helping patients overcome their problems.

The Ericksonian approach to psychotherapy has split into two distinct schools, one primarily concerned with family and couple therapy and one focusing on the individual. While both schools utilize indirect suggestion, they do so in different ways. The interactional approach is mostly concerned with what is happening between individuals or their enviornment and uses tasking as a means to disrupt patterns of behaviour and to teach new behavioural strategies. The intrapersonal approach is more directly concerned about what is happening within the individual and uses hypnosis to evoke unconscious processes for problem solving. Many therapists use a combinatiion of both approaches, as Erickson did.

The interactional approach was developed by researchers Haley, Bateson and Weakland who visited Erickson in the 1950's. Together with Watzlawick they formed the Palo Alto Group and developed a set of approaches that included symptom prescription, reframing, encouraging and utilizing resistance, anecdotes and analogies as well as techniques to encourage responses by frustrating them and encouraging relapses. This approach developed into Systems and Brief Therapy and is now widely used in family and couples counselling.

The intrapersonal approach on the other hand emphasised the importance of utilizing the patient's own inner resources for problem solving. Exponents of this approach believe that patients are usually unable to resolve their problems because of their limited conscious ways of thinking and often unknowingly reinforce their problems by trying to resolve them consciously.

By utilizing the symptoms, resistances, and complex on-going behaviours of the individual patient, the intrapersonal therapist encourages the patient to experience naturally occuring trance, as in daydreaming etc and then utilizes these states to guide the patiant on an inner search of the unconscious for the appropraite resources for problem solving.

The intrapersonal approach was developed primarily in the USA by Ernest Rossi from Erickson's work in the 1970's and in Europe by Stephen Brooks during the 1980-90's. By the end of his life Erickson was very ill and his therapeutic style had become more and more economical. Many of the young therapists who studied with Erickson in the 1970's believed that his economical style was the new way to do therapy. It has been suggested that his style was more due to his fatigue in old age rather than his discovery of a new innovative minimal approach. Considering that Erickson was very direct in his younger years suggests that this may be true. Never-the-less his sparse approach worked and he became the role model for many of these young therapists. Many became Erickson clones, something Erickson did not encourage, even to the point of wearing purple clothes (Erickson's favourite color) and mimicing his voice.

Many outstanding therapists such as Ernest Rossi, Stephen Brooks, Bill O'Hanlon, Stephen Gilligan and Jeffery Zeig have helped spread the Ericksonian approach to a much wider audience through their training courses and books. Aside from Erickson's own collected papers, the publications by these writers represent the best of what is available on ebay.

Since the spilt into two distinctive schools there has been a re-integration of these approaches. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) borrowed heavily from both schools and many therapists today do not limit themselves to one or the other. A small number of therapsists have taken Erickson's work in new directions, Rossi into the field of psychoneuroimmunology and Brooks into the field of Minimal Therapy where both achieve results that sometime defy explanation. O'Hanlon has helped develop the interactional approach with family and couple therapy while Gilligan and Zeig continue to be part of the Ericksonian community and continue to publish and teach Ericksonian approaches.